Dell Storage Solutions

Dell Technology Perspective: Intelligent Data Management

A Dell Point of View

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May 2011

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Contents

Introduction – It’s all about information ................................................................................... 4

The data landscape changes .................................................................................................... 4

An explosion in the amount of data being generated ........................................................... 4

Changing consumption models .......................................................................................... 4

Rising regulatory and litigation risks .................................................................................... 5

The balancing act .................................................................................................................... 5

How to enable growth while curbing operational expenses ................................................. 5

How to optimize the strategic value of data while mitigating the risks of having it ................ 5

How to ensure distributed data is both accessible and protected ......................................... 6

A tipping point ........................................................................................................................ 6

How can Dell help? ..................................................................................................................7

Dell’s IDM Point of View ..................................................................................................... 8

Core capabilities underlying IDM ........................................................................................ 9

A phased approach to IDM ................................................................................................ 11

How is Dell’s IDM approach different? ................................................................................12

Benefits of Dell’s IDM Strategy ...........................................................................................14

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Introduction – It’s all about information

Information is the lifeblood of companies. And yet, today there are significant

challenges in data management that make it difficult for business to efficiently

store, retrieve, sort through and make sense of their data, when and where

they need it. In fact, an Accenture study1 underscores the point, reporting that

61 percent of executives surveyed felt there was no good data available to

them to make informed business decisions.

The data landscape changes

Several key data landscape trends are creating the challenges that can keep

organizations from transforming data from an operational burden into a

valuable strategic asset. Dell’s Intelligent Data Management (IDM) approach

can help address each of these challenges.

An explosion in the amount and type of data being generated

Traditionally, companies have been primarily concerned with the management

of structured data such as transactional data stored in a database. Going

forward, however, unstructured data is driving massive growth, to an expected

35 trillion gigabytes of digital information by 2020, driven by the journey from

analog to digital of all major forms of media – voice, TV, radio, print2. These

kinds of unstructured data often lack the context and metadata structure

necessary to activate its strategic value. It is also larger, more static and is a

prime target for theft and litigation. Yesterday’s data management approaches

are simply ill-equipped for dealing with today’s growth realities.

Changing consumption models

Data is increasingly generated and consumed across a geographically

distributed and mobile infrastructure of people, processes and tools. IDC

estimates, for example, that the number of mobile workers worldwide has now

reached over 1 billion and will continue to grow to 1.19 billion by 20133, through

the use of devices such as smart phones, laptops and tablet computers.

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Rising regulatory and litigation risks

The costs of compliance have skyrocketed as regulatory agencies attempt to

encourage data transparency and governance through complex requirements

and financial penalties. Additionally, litigation continues to rise across the public

and private sectors. The bottom line is that organizations require more efficient

and cost effective approaches for proactively mitigating information risks.

The balancing act

These data landscape changes present complex and risk-laden data

management challenges for business leaders and IT managers who aspire

both to maximize the utilization and efficiency of infrastructure investments

while gaining greater insight to the business value of data. Specifically, these

challenges are:

How to enable growth while curbing operational expenses

Data may be growing fast, but storage budgets are not. Additionally,

constrained budgets make it difficult to hire the skills necessary to deploy and

integrate new technologies. In particular, though, constrained budgets make it

important for IT organizations to:

•Optimize existing storage infrastructures for investment protection

•Avoid costly generation-to-generation forklift upgrades and

data migrations

•Maximize the ROI of newly implemented solutions

How to optimize the strategic value of data while mitigating the risks of having it

Given the difficulties in understanding the content and context of unstructured

data, a significant challenge for IT organizations is to:

•Know how much data they have and what resources it is consuming

•Understand the changing business value and risk profile of their data

throughout its lifecycle

•Ensure unstructured data is assigned to the proper storage tier throughout

its useful life

•Define and execute data retention, preservation and deletion policies

based on business value and compliance requirements

•Retrieve information to support strategic business decisions, litigation

requests, or to demonstrate compliance with regulations

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How to ensure distributed data is both accessible and protected

Sensitive company data is now generated, stored and distributed across a large

footprint of geographically dispersed mobile devices. These devices are outside

the protective confines of the company’s brick and mortar, introducing new

challenges IT organizations must address, including:

•Ensuring storage systems are scalable and extensible enough to handle a

large number of geographically distributed hosts and clients

•Providing methods for data synchronization to prevent data loss, theft

and corruption

•Providing end-to-end business continuity and disaster recovery capabilities

In combination, these challenges make it difficult for IT organizations to

operationally manage data, unlock the information value of data, and ensure that

decision makers can obtain data when they need it. One key reason for this is that

the legacy storage infrastructures available to most IT organizations are inadequate

for these new data management challenges.

A tipping point

Many legacy approaches to data storage are rigid and ill-equipped to enabled

customers to deal with these new data management challenges. These legacy

approaches are often characterized by:

•Disparate workload-centric applications with siloed indexes, file systems

and storage devices

•Multiple namespaces designed to manage data’s physical storage location

but lacking valuable descriptive metadata, workflow management, or

data governance

•Proprietary scale-up storage tiers that must be continually upgraded

•Single-tier data storage that manages all data as if it were equal in value to

the business

And, these characteristics manifest themselves as significant IT resource burdens such as:

•Storing redundant or otherwise unnecessary data

•Storing an inordinate amount of data on expensive high performance

storage devices

•Cyclical and disruptive data migrations

•An inability to provide constituents with timely access to the right data

• Little automated control of data usage, access, creation, deletion, and retention

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Without a new approach to data management, these burdens threaten to keep

businesses and their IT departments overly focused on the operational burden

of managing storage instead of on unlocking the full strategic value of their

information assets.

How can Dell help?IDM is Dell’s overall approach to help enable IT organizations to evolve from

managing the storage of their data, to managing and delivering the data as

strategic information. IDM comprises a set of hardware and software solution

technologies and services frameworks that offer organizations the optimal

balance between storage infrastructure cost efficiency, performance, and

scalability, while enabling tight alignment between business processes and

supporting applications, so that enterprise information can be managed,

protected and optimally utilized throughout its useful life.

According to SNIA in 2004; the definition of Information Lifecycle

Management was:

Information Lifecycle Management comprises the policies, processes, practices, and tools used to align the business value of information with the most appropriate and cost effective IT infrastructure from the time information is conceived through its final disposition. Information is aligned with business processes through management policies and service levels associated with applications, metadata, information, and data.

This vision of what IT organizations are seeking to achieve still holds true,

however no single provider has yet been able to deliver on that vision for

its customers. Dell believes that an IDM approach to these complex set of

issues can make this vision a reality for many organizations, by focusing not

only on what the vision comprises, but more importantly on how these sets

of technologies and processes can be implemented in an efficient, phased

approach that is right for each organization.

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Dell’s IDM Point of View

Dell’s approach to IDM approach is focused on helping enable IT organizations to:

•Stay ahead of storage growth while controlling budgets

•Solve the management challenges of unstructured data and exponential

storage growth through proper planning and storage tiering

• Increase operational efficiencies through rationalizing data creation,

consumption and retention, using metadata driven policies to automate

content management

•Make data easily searchable so that the intellectual property within it can

be easily retrieved

•Deliver information to their stakeholders anytime, anywhere, on any device

Dell believes that there is no “one size fits all” IDM approach. Instead, Dell

believes the right IDM approach will depend upon a customer’s existing

infrastructure and business objectives.

However, Dell believes that fully customized, service-heavy piece-meal solutions

may be cost prohibitive for many organizations. Dell also believes that a low-

touch “self-service” model can expose other organizations to risk. Instead, Dell’s

IDM approach asserts that the best balance is to provide proven, pre-integrated

solutions that are nonetheless extensible, along with proven consulting best

practices to accommodate unique needs.

Dell’s strategy for implementing IDM solutions for customer organizations is

based on a phased approach:

Develop a connected storage infrastructure based on latest

storage technologies such as storage virtualization and scale-out to

simplify management, lower costs, and enable data to be managed across

the enterprise.

Leverage the information content within data to determine how it can

be optimally managed to create operational and cost efficiencies. Data

is placed on the right tier so that the value of the data is aligned with the

cost of the storage, and can be managed through predefined policies

throughout its useful life.

Achieve a service model approach to deliver data to end users. Dell’s Fluid

Data™ architecture will enable this to be done in the most efficient way for

customers through the ability to categorize, index, search, optimize, and

move data throughout the infrastructure, and can enable a combination of

private, public or hybrid cloud models.

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When implementing IDM solutions, Dell believes investments should be

protected to the extent possible, and that “forklift” data migrations should be

avoided. To achieve this, Dell has designed solutions to be flexible so that they

can work with existing infrastructure and applications. Dell has also designed

solutions to be “future ready” to seamlessly incorporate future technologies.

To further protect customers’ investments, Dell enables organizations to take

an incremental approach, based on their current perspective, to eventually

implement a full IDM solution, all in the timeframe right for them.

In summary, Dell believes IDM provides organizations with the right

technologies, services, and processes to evolve from managing storage, to

managing information and then leveraging information intelligently. With IDM,

Dell believes IT organizations can play a more strategic role in driving growth

and competitive advantage.

Core capabilities underlying IDM

Three core sets of Dell capabilities enable delivery of IDM solutions:

1. An efficient storage infrastructure

Dell’s storage infrastructure is designed to simplify management, ensure

performance scales with capacity, and, importantly, protect existing

customer investments.

Virtualized storage: Assets for primary storage, retention, backup and

archiving will become increasingly virtualized. These assets can be within the

customer’s data center as a private cloud, or part of a public cloud, or hybrid

models. The aggregation of storage assets enables greater efficiencies in

capacity utilization, and in simplifying management of those assets as a unified

set of resources.

Scale-out: Peer scaling technology ensures performance is not compromised

with capacity growth. This enables pay-as-you-grow expansion of storage

capacity and resources aligned to business needs.

Investment protection: By continuing to support platforms across multi

generations of hardware and software, Dell seeks to maximize organizations’

utilization of investments, rather than force frequent “forklift migrations” of data

from legacy systems to new solutions.

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2. A Fluid Data architecture

This architecture weaves together data across the enterprise to enable an

automated intelligent way to:

Align the value of the data with the right storage tier and protection level:

Not all data has the same value to a company, which means data should

be stored and protected differently. For example, being able to distinguish

between images of an employee’s vacation versus images of a vendor’s new

product designs, allows the organization to assign business value and thus

assign different retention and archive policies. Similarly, “active” data should be

placed in production systems, while data that has transitioned to an “inactive”

state can be sent to archival systems. By understanding the information value

of data, IDM assigns data to the right tier and protection level, increasing the

efficiency of data storage.

Optimize capacity: Content-aware data deduplication and compression

will dramatically reduce the number and size of files, the amount of data

transported through the network, the footprint of the data that needs to

be stored, and then facilitate the speed and integrity at which those files

are brought back to useable state for the end user. This will become a key

capability integrated into the storage architecture and infrastructure to address

the explosive growth in data.

Automate management: Metadata attached to each data file contains

information on that file’s content and context, allowing storage management

policies to be automatically applied. The architecture enables the systematic

capture of this metadata across all file types and ingestion points, so that data

across the enterprise can be taken under management of this automated

policy and data movement engine.

Enable information retrieval and delivery: The metadata attached to each

file, across the enterprise, also has the advantage of making data searchable

with greater speed and accuracy. With this fluid data architecture, e-discovery

searches become more effective due to each file having been assigned

detailed metadata at the initial point of ingest, and thus later enabling more

precise delivery of information with specified search attributes. Ability to assign

and thus later search based on metadata across the enterprise also enables

information to be delivered to end users across diverse locations and devices.

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3. Services

An IDM approach also involves providing IT organizations with the technical

and business process expertise to determine how to implement solutions

based on their specific requirements. Dell has developed a portfolio of end-

to-end services that support customers in making these technology decisions

with maximum ROI efficiency. These services include:

Consulting workshops, assessments, design, implementation and support

services to help customers understand the best approach to IDM given their

current perspective and legacy infrastructure and future requirements.

Assessment services that help IT organizations make informed decisions by

understanding the solution ROI. In addition the assessment provides a guide to

efficiently and rapidly adopting the proposed solution.

Design services that help IT organizations avoid “one-size-fits all”

solutions. This service provides a tailored solution with specific product

recommendations, service recommendations, and implementation plans.

Implementation services that help IT organizations efficiently deploy validated

designs into production. The services include on site deployment and full

production rollout, with comprehensive project management, as well as

reporting and next steps.

Support services both on site and remotely for all Dell hardware components

as well as integrated ISV solutions where Dell is the primary service provider.

Software-as-a-Service, remote delivery and cloud technologies to provide

alternative service delivery models, to enable both ease of doing business and

efficiencies to reduce service costs.

A phased approach to IDM

Dell recognizes that organizations are at different stages in their storage

management, with some focused on simply keeping up with growth of content

in their enterprise, while others have moved to higher level concerns around

information governance and management. Dell further recognizes that moving

towards a true service level model of delivering insights to end users is not a simple,

single step process. Instead, for many organizations, this process is an evolution of

their data management practices versus a revolution. To help organizations take

the vision of IDM and make it a practical reality, Dell can help by approaching this

journey through three key phases:

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Connect the storage infrastructure

Many organizations may have disparate departmental or application driven

silos of storage around which capacity is being added continually, and their

budgets and resources are not able to keep up with the growth. These

organizations have core pain points around knowing what data they have, its

location, its value, and specific attributes. As a result, IT organizations at this

phase are looking to connect these disparate pools of storage and data into a

single streamlined infrastructure that is designed to better keep up with growth

and reduce ongoing budget and resources to manage.

Make data accessible

Organizations who already have awareness and control over their storage

infrastructure may then be working towards optimizing the data to match the

requirements of business stakeholders. In this phase, data is accessed and

classified according to whether it is required for use in production systems,

whether it should be archived to, for example, comply with regulatory

requirements, or confidently deleted. The data is then placed on the right tier

so that the value of the data is aligned with the cost of the storage.

Intelligently deliver information to end users

This last phase of evolution enables organizations to achieve a service

model approach to deliver data to end users. Dell’s fluid data architecture

will enable this to be done in the most efficient way for customers through

the ability to categorize, index, search, optimize, and move data throughout

the infrastructure, and can enable a combination of private, public or hybrid

cloud models.

How is Dell’s IDM approach different?

Dell’s approach is unique in how we seek to implement intelligent data management

for organizations:

Customer led

Dell recognizes that every organization’s environment, circumstances, and

business requirements are different. Consequently, rather than force fitting

“one size fits all” products or solutions into every environment, Dell has a

comprehensive portfolio of technologies and services that can be leveraged

to develop the best-fit solution for each customer. Consultative services

catalyze the best-of-breed combination of Dell’s Fluid Data™ architecture,

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complementary software and technology components, professional service

methodologies, and proven reference architectures to create technology

solutions that solve specific customer problems.

Proven and cost effective

Dell believes customers are best served with solutions that are easy to

deploy and easy to manage. Dell has reduced cost and complexity by

designing and qualifying pre-integrated solution stacks and by applying best

practices from prior engagements. This combination helps maximize solution

ROI by significantly improving speed, quality and ease of implementation and

ongoing management.

Integrated architecture

Dell’s IDM approach incorporates an extensible technology foundation where

key data and storage management features and control points are integrated

natively yet delivered modularly. This Fluid Data architecture ensures that

technology components work together, seamlessly, to automate storage

and data management while providing flexibility and interoperability for

heterogeneous hardware and software complements.

Investment protection

Dell’s IDM approach is designed to provide flexibility and choice while

incorporating advanced intellectual property components to provide long

term data and storage management optimization and investment protection.

Dell’s Fluid Data architecture supports compatibility with existing standards-

based heterogeneous environments as part of a phased evolutionary

approach. However, Dell’s Fluid Data architecture is designed to provide

advanced storage and data management features within an extensible peer-

scaling architecture that makes it a smart choice for customers seeking a

revolutionary approach.

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Benefits of Dell’s IDM strategy

In this changing landscape where data is proliferating rapidly, the challenge to IT

organizations has evolved beyond storing data, to actively managing data so that

its value can be discerned and delivered to stakeholders when and where needed.

Many industry providers have been attempting to deliver on this vision for customers

for some time. Only Dell’s IDM strategy can help customers convert this vision into

a reality by:

• Minimizing the time and resources required to design, deploy, and

support solutions

• Implementing in a pragmatic phased approach at the pace right for

each organization

• Protecting and making use of, rather than throwing away

existing investments

In summary, by focusing on implementing an IDM strategy with maximizing

customer ROI in mind, Dell makes it possible for any organization – even

those without deep pockets or armies of in house experts – to evolve towards

fully leveraging the value of their data and its potential as a strategic and

competitive asset.

To learn more about the Dell Intelligent Data Management strategy, visit: www.dell.com/datamanagement

To explore the broad portfolio of Dell storage solutions, visit: www.dellstorage.com

1 Accenture survey of 250 Executives, 2008.2 IDC White Paper sponsored by EMC. The Digital Universe Decade – Are You Ready?, May 2010.3 IDC, Worldwide Mobile Worker Population 2009 – 2013 forecast, December 2009.

© 2011 Dell Inc. All Rights Reserved. WP927_IDM_POV_USA_051111